Cultural geography

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Cultural geography is a sub-field within human geography. Cultural Geography is the study of cultural products and norms and their variation across and relations to spaces and places. It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government, and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant from one place to another and on explaining how humans function spatially

Areas of study

The area of study of Cultural Geography is very broad. Among many applicable topics within the study are:

Globalization has been theorised as an explanation for cultural convergence.
Westernization or other similar processes such as Americanization, Islamization and others.
Theories of Cultural hegemony or cultural assimilation via cultural imperialism.
Cultural areal differentiation as a study of differences in way of life encompassing ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, and structures of power and whole range of cultural practices in geographical areas (see also Cultural region).
Study of cultural landscapes
Other topics include Spirit of place, colonialism, post-colonialism, internationalism, immigration, emigration. ecotourism ...

History

Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early Twentieth century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by Carl Sauer (called the father of Cultural geography), at the University of California at Berkeley. As a result of this, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.

Sauer defined the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. He saw that cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, but also shaped them too. This interaction between the 'natural' landscape and man creates the 'cultural landscape'. Sauer's work was highly qualitative and descriptive and was surpassed in the 1930s by the regional geography of Richard Hartshorne, followed by the quantitative revolution. Cultural geography was generally sidelined, though writers such as David Lowenthal continued to work on the concept of landscape.

In the 1970s, the critique of positivism in geography caused geographers to look beyond the quantitative geography for its ideas. One of these re-assessed areas was also cultural geography.

New Cultural geography

Since the 1980s, a "new cultural geography" has emerged, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical traditions including Marxian political economy, feminist theory, post-colonial theory, postmodernism, and poststructuralism.

Drawing particularly from the theories of Michel Foucault and performativity in western academia, and the more diverse influences of postcolonial theory, there has been a concerted effort ot deconstruct the cultural in order to make apparent the various power relations. A particular area of interest is that of identity politics and construction of identity (see feminist geography).

Examples of areas of study include:

Feminist geography
Children's geographies
Some parts of Tourism geography
Some more recent developments in Political geography

References

Scientific journals

Journal of Cultural Geography — published since 1980, currently at Oklahoma State University.
Cultural Geographies - (formerly Ecumene) flagship journal of "new cultural geography."

External links

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Wednesday February 06, 2008 at 19:08:51 PST (GMT -0800)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation